One of the new features we added into the version 4.3 of WebORB for Java is support for the Robotlegs framework. The framework is becoming quite popular among ActionScript developers and we see it used quite often. The new feature lets you generate all the supporting Robotlegs ActionScript code for any Java service supported by WebORB. The list of services includes POJOs, EJBs, Spring beans, Grails services and SOAP web services. The video below includes a demonstration of the feature. Enjoy!
I am very happy to report that we released a new version of WebORB for Java – version 4.3. The theme of the release is ‘Developer Productivity’. As you may already know, WebORB enables integration at four different levels: remoting (RPC), data management, real-time publish/subscribe messaging and video/audio streaming and recording. With this release, we deliver code generators for all of these levels of integration. Below is a brief description of the new features you will find in 4.3:
Data management for JavaScript Clients – If you’re familiar with WebORB, more than likely you know about our data management framework. If not, then you can learn about it either from the WebORB Data Management documentation or the Data Management webinar recording. In short, the framework lets you quickly import your database schema into our Data Modeller tool and generate client and server-side code to enable full CRUD with your data from the ActionScript or JavaScript client or the server-side code. The same code generator can also create a demo application which demonstrates the power of the API. The JavaScript client support lets you create a data-driven ORM solution for your database in seconds. In addition to the APIs for CRUD operations, the JavaScript client also supports client-synchronization for the changes done by other clients working with the same dataset.
Remoting code generator for Robotlegs - Robotlegs is quickly becoming a popular ActionScript framework. We included a very powerful code generator which can generate all the supporting ActionScript classes for a given Java service (POJO, EJB, Spring bean, Grails service or SOAP web service) . The generated code enables remoting with the service and includes all the supporting classes conforming to the Robotlegs framework. This includes controller, events, mediators and ActionScript value objects. Read more about WebORB and Robotlegs integration.
Native Android Java code generator and invocation client - WebORB includes a tiny native Java library supporting remote procedure calls of the WebORB hosted services from native Android Java applications. Additionally, we also added a code generator which can create Java client-side code for any given WebORB service. The generated project also includes a visual invoker to make it easier to see the generated code in action.
Windows Phone invocation client (with code generator)- similar to the native Android Java library, we also added a native Windows Phone (Silverlight) client-side library into the WebORB distribution. Using the library Windows Phone applications can easily integrate with WebORB-hosted Java services using either RPC or publish/subscribe APIs. There is also a code generator which can create C# code and a sample Windows Phone project for any deployed Java service.
New Swiz code generator – We have completely rewritten the Swiz code generator to support the latest release of the Swiz framework. The generated code includes all the events, pre-wired controller, service invoker and value object types.
Code generator for rich media Flex, AIR and Mobile apps – WebORB for Java supports the RTMP protocol and enables video streaming and recording, remote shared objects and server-side data push. In this release we added a code generator which can create a sample Flex, AIR or mobile application with the code demonstrating all of these features. Optionally, the code can be generated to support RTMP tunneling for any of the selected features. Read more..
Code generator for multi-client Publish Subscribe messaging – WebORB provides native libraries and APIs for publish/subscribe messaging for Flex, AIR, JavaScript, native Java and .NET clients. The unifying concept for all of these APIs is the messaging destination. With the new release, it is trivially easy to manage destinations and on top of this, developers can quickly generate native publish/subscribe messaging apps for all the supported client-side types.
Publish/Subscribe Messaging Test Drive – When you develop a messaging application, it may be very important to be able to observe message traffic over your destination. It is very easy to do that with the new release. Simply open the management console, Find your destination under the Messaging Server tab and click “Test Drive”. The feature lets you both create subscribers and publish test messages.
As you can see it is a feature packed release. We also fixed quite a few bugs and you can access a full report in the Midnight Coders bug tracking system. We plan to publish follow-on posts with videos and examples demonstrating all the new functionality in the coming days.
This is just a heads-up that we finished an implementation of a binary remoting protocol for our new Communication Library for iOS. The new feature provides a way to integrate iOS applications with Java, .NET and PHP backends. The next release of the library is a few days out and will enable extremely fast remote procedure call (RPC) support for POJOs, Java Spring beans, EJBs, Grails services, SOAP Web Services, .NET classes, WCF services, Spring.NET beans and PHP classes. We’re also working on a benchmark application which will demonstrate how our implementation stacks up against currently available integration approaches like JSON or SOAP. Stay tuned, the client-server integration for native iOS apps is about to change.
One of the most frequently talked about subjects on our discussion forums is the one about the Flex’s ‘Send Failed’ error. Pretty much in all of the cases, the error is due to misconfiguration. The observation I made is the configuration problems arose primarily because of the lack of understanding on the developer’s part of how Flex resolves the remoting URLs. To clarify the subject we recorded a short video/presentation which you can access below. The video also describes how one might receive the Send Failed error and what can be done to solve it. Enjoy!
If you have a need to build a multi-user application that is automatically updated and synchronized across multiple clients whenever a change is made to the data, you may benefit from using Remote Shared Objects (RSO). A recent tutorial written by Damian Piccolo and Esteban Yofre at Anden Solutions may be just what you need to get started with using WebORB for client-to-server, server-to-client and client-to-client communication and synchronization with RSOs. Here is an excerpt from the article:
“RSOs are particularly useful when they are used on several clients at the same time. When one client changes data that updates the RSO on the server, the server sends the change to all other connected clients, enabling you to synchronize many different clients with the same data. RSOs can also be updated and accessed by the server, giving developers more options for application development. In this tutorial, you will use RSOs to create a simple online version of the Add-a-word game. The object of this game is to add a word to a sentence, one user at a time, and eventually come up with a very long sentence (that still makes sense)”.
